Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene

by Ezra Buckley on October 13, 2017

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was a writer, novelist, author, and philosopher whose significant influence on 20thcentury thought was twofold. The first is via his notion of “total mobilization,” a description of the technological age as characterized by a wholesale transformation of human life into exploitable energies and resources. The second is via his impact on the thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest of 20thcentury philosophers. This influence is manifested particularly in Heidegger’s notion, in The Question Concerning Technology, of the Gestell or “Enframing,” a mode of existence in which beings of all sorts, including human beings, appear as means towards ends. Blok’s book is a narrow exposition of both of these aspects of Jünger’s thought. The book explicitly refrains from considering Jünger’s biographical details, his political positions, or his non-philosophical writings, but, in places, more information or discussion of these would have been helpful.